The Moz Blog

Zefrank with the Definition of Brand

Many of you are probably already fans of one of the web's most popular video-bloggers, but today is the first time that I've felt his brilliant ramblings were on-topic enough to be featured on the site. Ze covers brand identity, recognition, creation and loyalty in this brief video.

The humor and razor-sharp wit are terrific, but there's a message for businesses and entrepreneurs there, too. A few of the questions that Ze brings up:

When people think of your brand - is it something they want to be associated with?

What do they gain from that association?

Do naming conventions and pre-existing biases work for or against you?

What can you do to improve these aspects and make your brand more appealing?

The recent schism of Danny Sullivan and Incisive have forced all of us in the search space to examine our brand loyalty - are we loyal to SearchEngineWatch, or to Danny? To the SES conference series, or to their organizer? How has Danny created a brand that is both bigger than himself, and yet inexplicably tied to him and how to we, as passionate fans of that brand, start to separate the two?

This has happened quite a few times in the search space, with everyone from Mike Grehan to Andy Beal to Nick Wilson - in each case, a split forces us to re-define the brand, make a decision about our loyalty and interest and take a course of action. With the SEOmoz brand, I'm in the lucky position of having complete control - Rand & SEOmoz are one entity - building one doesn't run the risk of hurting the other (but what if I ever wanted to sell SEOmoz?), but with larger firms and more popular brands, separation has to exist. Larry & Sergey aren't Google, Jerry Yang isn't Yahoo! and Bill Gates isn't Microsoft, but Michael Arrington is TechCrunch and Kevin Rose is Digg.

All this begs the obvious question - what direction are you taking with your brand?

p.s. Don't worry - I'm not selling SEOmoz. I was just using that to illustrate a point.

6 Comments

I think this is a great show and watch it regularly since he had a go at a mate of mine in the "something from the comments" feature.
The question of classic branding and the internet is a hugely interesting one to me (working in internet marketing). What is brand marketing for the net? It surely isn't purely about the TV campaign anymore. Your site is (to a huge extent) your brand on the net, be it content, look and feel, tone of voice or whatever and since people spend so much time interacting with your site (far more than they would ever spend seeing your advertising) that seems to be the most important point... but how many big internet companies truly have a brand watch dog advising on site decisions? What do people think?

I think this has very little to do with branding. In the B2B world, people don't do business with companies, they do business with People. Those people become the "face" of the company, so there's a certain amount of identification that happens. So if that person were to leave, is your loyalty to the company or the person? If your most positive experiences come by way of that person, then the answer is clear.
There's a reason why many doctors, lawyers, salespeople, etc. end up being able to take their best clients with them when they leave ... it's about the quality of the relationship that's fostered, and has little whatsoever to do with the "brand" of the company they worked for (or even maybe started).
Perhaps a more apt question would be how much are we the company we work for, and how much is the the company us? Ok, that's worded badly, but I think you get the point.

Kevin Rose may be Digg but Digg is not Kevin Rose. Kevin could walk away today and there would be little or not change to Digg. He is not responsible for any of the content anymore. Sure, there is a loyal userbase but Digg would not change much if he left at this point.

Very intresting. And I totally agree with Ze, brand identity is crucial in todays marketing and we are running out of options to associate with. Everyone wants a part of the cake and everyone wants to be unique in their brand.
The company I work for,Base One Group, has a division specialising in branding, this pdf could be useful if anyone want to know more about branding
Great topic Rand!
Cheers,
Lisa